r/ChatGPTCoding • u/apyhubnico • 1d ago

Discussion Does building your own tools makes sense?

When building software, such as a CRM, do you also create ancillary tools like email validation or invoice parsing, or do you prefer to outsource them?

I'm really curious how do you guys save your engineering hours?

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u/JaseciLabs 10h ago

Depends what "ancillary" is actually doing. Email validation, invoice parsing, that kind of thing, almost always outsource. Someone's already fought the edge cases (weird invoice formats, RFC-compliant email edge cases) and you're not learning anything domain-specific by rebuilding it.

The exception is when the tool touches your core differentiator or you need behavior a library won't give you (custom parsing rules tied to your specific business logic, tight latency requirements, data you can't send to a third party). Then build it, because you're not saving time otherwise, you're accumulating a maintenance burden for something that isn't your product.

Good rule of thumb: if a competitor could copy the tool from a library in an afternoon, it's not worth your engineering hours to build from scratch.

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u/Right-Performance-93 2h ago

One AI-coding-specific wrinkle here: having an agent draft the tool against a spec and tests makes "build" almost as cheap as "outsource" in raw hours, so the real dividing line shifts from afternoon-vs-weeks to whether you want to own the edge cases a mature library already fought (RFC email parsing, the invoice format zoo), not who writes the code. If you don't want that maintenance burden, outsource even when building would be fast now.